Filmmaker Gives a FRESH Take on Sustainable Agriculture

Few things depress me as much as stories of our ruinous use of pesticides. Food, that most basic necessity, the sustenance we give our children, should be clean and if not healthy, not harmful. All the work of all the many dedicated people to bring organic, local, and sustainable agriculture back into the mainstream have been hampered by the problems of scale, and the continuous push to bring food costs down (and also hide their true costs). So the feature-length documentary FRESH seems like a great way to bring re-enlivened perspective to that all perplexing question: what should we eat?

To be released at the Newport Film Festival this week and on the Internet for wider distribution later this spring, FRESH has some older faces from the sustainable food movement - farmer activists Joel Salatin and Will Allen, for example - but also promises lots of inspiring vignettes from the middle of the movement.

What to eat?Eating locally and sustainably or organically has its detractors - organizations like CropLife Association that diss Michelle Obama's White House organic garden - because they believe rightly or wrongly that Americans don't have the time, and the globe doesn't have the space to not use chemical help for food production.

FRESH challenges that viewpoint. Film maker Ana Joanes spent two years interviewing Americans in the sustainable food movement, if it can be called that. Joanes says in the interview clip above that she started making the film because she wanted to find hope, and she did.

"Not only is food tasty, and personal, and cultural and pleasurable," Swiss-born Joanes says in the You Tube clip in an interview from the Grass-Fed Party, "it affects you directly...your health. It's a microcosm of all the problems."